For Ludum Dare, I’m a firm believer of using the theme for inspiration and as a restriction to stimulate creative solutions – and then ultimately not letting it get between you and producing a good game. It’s a starting point, not a destination. A muse, not a contract with a client. Continue reading…

This is the rambling postmortem of my Ludum Dare 29 compo entry, Deep Dome. Crossposted on the #LD48 site. Early in the jam I had a bunch of different ideas. This is pretty normal. I liked the theme, so much so that it almost gave me too many options for achievable small games I would have enjoyed making. In the end I went for my ‘fallback idea’ – something I’d wanted to try if I could tweak it to fit the theme: a Descent-like game with visuals similar to Zombie Gunship. What I wanted to achieve was: 1) Set up 6DOF ship controls that felt good. Not necessarily identical to the original Descent, but along those lines. 2) Recreate visuals similar to Zombie Gunship (essentially inverted greyscale, with object highlighting) 3) Incorporate this into a small prototype game, as a sandbox for something bigger.

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I’m happy since I feel like I largely met goals (1) and (2), with some detours, while the gameplay component of (3) isn’t nearly refined enough. Continue reading…

In 2013, I decided to participate in One Game A Month (aka #1GAM). The goal was to create a game with a proper start, middle and end, each and every month of the year. It was a bit like one big ongoing game jam.

While I don’t like to think of it as a competition, I’m still going to brag; I managed to rank within the top 100 after the 12th month (somewhere around ~75th). I’ll admit this helped push me to get games made in the last few months while juggling the responsibility of being a new parent, so I guess the ‘gamification’ aspect worked :) Here’s a rundown & some thoughts on the 11 games I made:

Warning mega-post ahead.

TLWR; I did One Game a Month and made lots of games, several of which I’m happy with the result. I made l a bunch of games that run on OUYA, kind of by accident. I’m not (intentionally) doing 1GAM this year, but if you haven’t done it, you should.